Blog Comments & Posts

There are no doubts that Facebook has been successful in building synergies between what they provided online and what users wanted to do in real life. It has created such an ecosystem that now Businesses, large and small, are actively working out strategies to reach out and engage with users.

After reading through "Widgets gone wild" blog post and reading lot of 188 odd comments, I am taken aback that no body suggested JustSayHi to stick to their gun and keep the website running.This is going to set a bad precedent for many other online businesses. Before you read this, I am neither an expert in online businesses nor in SEO world. I am still struggling m...

Between - I think we all copy Amazon landing pages and do every feature they have done. Reviews is one such feature - despite 2 decades of constant stories on how its the best thing ever, I feel its time to redo reviews. Most of the internet population is using mobile and they are not going to really write reviews on a mobile screen (% is far less) - it has to be a NPS like rating system on products - that's the only thing users will actually click on.

Issue is with seeding and scaling this properly. I run an ecommerce startup (Shimply.com) and we have tried to close the loop by asking users to provide reviews on the product/sellers that they have bought. However, a small percentage do write any views which limits the overall effect.

We have also tried to get popular folks to review products/site etc but achieving scale seems very hard.

Very interesting test. Did you check if there was impact on overall traffic after 7, 14 and 30 days especially for site that was de-indexed for longer period? Also, what if you just shut the server down (long outage scenario) vs asking google explicitly to de-index.

I think behavior may be different based on method of de-indexing. Also, something cool to test will be to slow the site down explicitly and see impact on overall crawl rate and traffic.

Lots of stuff to test - we just launched our site Shimply.com and will be testing bunch of these things there!

Incredible posts. There are number of other optimizations that folks will also have to take a look at in near future e.g. mobile a/b testing (Optimimo, Clutch.io), mobile speed testing (http://www.speedtest.net/mobile.php), mobile usability (heat maps by VWO and few others in HTML5, heatmap tools for native apps are also in works!) etcOverall, a very interesting read and lot more to come!

I went through SEO Reborn presentation and there is ton of data in it. Problem is that unlike SEO, social media related efforts are still very much immeasurable.
Are there few key steps that can yield 80% results? (Of course, KPIs need to be defined first)

Actually, there are tons of them but what works for one does not necessarily work for other. Also, you have to factor in the amount of time you have to spend on this.

What other customer outreach channels do you have?
Plug social media icons and you will see your email subscribers, website visitors, walk-in customers at office slowly converting into your FB likes. It's not a way to get million fans but it will add quality fans over time.

Do you have a budget to get fans?
If you do, use FB PPC to acquire targeted customers

Do you know of any other page owners?
Cross-promotion drives tons of traffic and likes. We use it on our FB page to continuously drive value to our paying clients.

There are many tools but few only matter. With almost all of them, tracking remains a big blackbox.
Companies investing in social media are taking a leap of faith, which should not be the case. At SocialAppsHQ, we discovered several companies that are generating real and meaning business.
e.g.

A wine company in India generated 3,000 leads from Facebook, out of which 300 subscribed to their lifetime membership

A restaurant company in UK tracked number of calls made via Facebook (used a special tracking phone number and put it on SocialAppsHQ's restaurant app) and they reported getting 5-7 calls per day. (Not sure about incremental nature)

Early indicators are positive but we need more ways to find details on interaction, enhance the meaning of 'like', incremental nature of traffic (please read interesting reports by Spinback and TicketMaster) etc.
edited 2011-09-08 21:24:04

At the end of day, it has boiled down to large companies doing more of inhouse marketing than outsourcing and small companies are realizing that they have to do it but can't do it all.

They are looking for a person who can take care of all their marketing woes whether it's SEO/PPC or Social Media campaigns.

To make the job difficult, there is too much noise in the market! However, that's true with any upcoming industry. I do think that marketers need to charge more appropriately for their services given the increased load

Depending on type of businesses, there are also tons of ways to engage and get more customers through referrals. Social media channels can be pretty useful in driving that desired result.
Unless you spend on FB ads, most efforts are long term though.
What is your experience with your clients related to Social media?
Thx
Rajat Garg
SocialAppsHQ

It's interesting to see how social signals are becoming so much more relevant. It's all the more important to make sure that we have tools to effectively manage large scale marketing campaigns effectively.
Any suggestions on 3 tools that will get most value for a small business owner's time?

Besides Craigslist, can you offer other good examples of how home page has been used effectively to put 100s of links to all category pages.

Companies tend to design super-heavy menus which add to confusing menu or add a really large footer, which is again discouraged.

Many companies have a sitemap page with a list of hundreds of category links. However, it is not the most linked to page on the website, so using that theory, it will be able to pass less link juice downstream.

We have tried doing things like 'Recently searched/viewed', 'Most popular' but in most cases they are not the most ideal top level category pages.

I am increasingly using no-follow for the sites I manage. In our case, we want to streamline and make sure robots follow and index all the important pages fast.

Our technology allows for faceted search and this adds millions of pages (because of seattle home with all price range combination, bed combination, bath combination blah...) and 90% of these pages provide little or no value for search engines to crawl.

Just remember - Google is just a marketing channel for your site. Believe it or not, there are websites that get 60-70% of their traffic directly and have very little dependency on Google.

It does - its hard to create a case study around this. However, several experiments have suggested to us that getting a link that drives traffic as well ends up helping us get a better ranking in search engines.

Unless, you have never advertised on social media sites, you can not argue with the fact that social media traffic (esp. Myspace/Facebook types) convert at a fraction of other channels (email, search, direct etc).

Add on it, the requirement of continuously remaining on top of all your friends/tweets etc, which never scales.

Unless you do it for vanity purposes more than ROI (which is the reason why people are putting money online vs offline - right?), it will be hard to justify the need to hire a person to manage twitter/facebook profile for your company. Especially, when same dollars can be spent on business development with companies with a more direct & long term ROI.

I agree on 1 thing though with many comments, there is a huge potential and we all need to watch it closely.

Apply conventional wisdom - will buying that domain/company add revenue to your business. If so, how much and what is the cost associated with it.

Web is a dynamic world and domains keep coming up and going away - buying a domain name just for the years of its existence is not a sustained business model (at least not for me - I am sure companies like Marchex and dozens of others here may disagree).

Lot of large companies do cloaking incl Amazon. They have 10s of millions of pages and they want search engines to index the useful content fast and not get confused or start going in cycles between different pages.

There is nothing wrong in cloaking - just don't do it to game the search engines.

It is also very relative - you can spend 30-40K to get a good software solution from StrongMail and others. Then, use it to send millions of emails per month compared to other channels where you will need few people to execute it. Add the salaries and they all start to become expensive.

Email is one of the tactics to reach that goal. Some viral promotions like
- "Refer 10 friends and Win a date with [Your favorite actor/actress]" -> Partner with 10 big stars of all age groups that appeal to different audience.
- Assuming that you have a paid program - "Refer a friend and get 6 months of free trial"
- "Refer a friend and win a date at your local cool and snazzy restaurant/cruise etc"

If 10% of 500,000 recommend 10 friends each and this cycle continues for few months, you will be close to a number. Also, goal should be to hit a critical mass and not everyone in US. After that, people will come on its own by typing your URL in the browser.

I get your point - that given your genius in building links / SEO, its hard to go out on a limb and build a business without it.

I don't expect you to change your decision, but here is what I think ->
If Amazon / Buy.com other big companies have 80-90% traffic coming from Google, their stocks will dip everytime Google updates its algorithm. A company losing $20-30 Bn of market cap based on Google algorithm update is unacceptable.

That is why, big or wannabe big companies tend to maintain a healthy balance of traffic - more in the channels we can control vs not.

I think goal for companies should be to keep free search traffic less than 20-30% of overall traffic. If you are ever going above that, focus your efforts in other areas to grow overall traffic to keep a healthy ratio.

Assuming that OnePlusYou is very successful as Just SayHi and in 5 years, you go public at $1 Bn valuation. You then go to a SMX conference, get drunk and reveal your secrets to Matt Cutt or someone else, and Oneplusyou gets penalized. Suddenly, your company is $1 worth.

(I am making an assumption that your company valuation is based on traffic alone. Usually, it is LTV of customer* number of customers + many other factors.)

In any case, I wish you best of luck in whatever you decide and know that I will be looking at your companies to find clever ideas to promote my own companies.

Paid link definition is too loose. The only thing I get out of it is that don't do link exchange if you are not adding any value and is only to game the PR system.

As long as you are building partnerships to grow your traffic/revenue/selection, you are ok. Do what you will do whether there is Google or not. I am not saying that we should ignore 800 pound guerilla in the room but if you are building a stable long term business, then search engines have to come around and show content that is more relevant - which will be your company as you are the only one with the money to pay for it and grow it in a long term.

This is really sad - decision of Google may be governed by their own interest but decision of Matt and other people from JustSayHi to actually move to a new domain due to so called Google penalty has disastrous consequences - not only for SEOs but for all businesses in general.

You cannot govern your business decisions based on some other company that doesn't give crap about your business.

Will it makes sense for Cadbury to change its name if Walmart decides to ban Cadbury because they are being very successful in getting out there?

Or, Do you recommend BMW should have changed its name when Google decided to blacklist them?

If above argument is absurd, so is JustSayHi's decision.

Key is to diversify - you have 500,000 registered users and you are brilliant at creating creative and unique widgets. They are over 500,000 backlinks, so you have created a significant brand for yourself.

You should be thinking about what alternate sources of traffic can be used to grow your website -

1) Should you buy other dating sites?

2) Should you be partnering with sites where they get teen traffic and drive referral traffic to yourself?

3) How can you personalize the site and experience and use email as a marketing tool to drive another 10 million users?

I am sure if you have 10 million users, Google will re-index you and not only re-index, most of the bloody googlers will be on your site finding dating partners.

4) Get on Oprah/TV shows and reach larger audience.

5) Do you have a product to sell - if so, build a big affiliate channel.

6) If you have a revenue, do SEM - Google will definitely take your money then.

7) Have banner ads on every bloody property on the web - ever seen Chevrolet ads or, classmates.com or, amazon.com

8) Keep going until you have > 10M users and you are in top 100 websites. Then, file for re-inclusion.

Again, I personally feel that JustSayHi's approach to move to a new domain instead of finding alternate source of traffic and grow their websites is a very short sighted approach.

Sorry to be too harsh !!!

Rajat

PS:I am not condoning spamming but I am not in favor of changing businesses for sake of Google either.

I think that people should determine an ROI (yeah, i am a bit of a nerd) for their actions -

1) Why do you want to become famous (what is return)?
- Do you have a business that is name after you?
- Do you think it helps you get more money?
- Do you think it is going to be cool?

2) What will it take to become famous (investment part)?
- What is your industry like ?
- What do you need to do - write blogs, run around naked, run in an election ?
- How much time?
- How much money?

When you have answers for above, make a call as to whether it is even worth it ?

I think domain should be closely tied to the product that you are selling unless you are working in a niche where you can brand your company easily or, pay millions of dollars to create a branding campaign.

We can take a cue from SE Asian countries where search engines like Mohalo have been very successful. I feel that there are many compelling reasons for a new start up to take over web search and we will see something like that coming up in next few years.

Also, Google has lot of fat now and it will be hard for the company to move to a new technology. However, they can still buy that company !!!